During the first day of theLinuxWorld Expo,Hancom Linux andtheKompany.com became the talk of the show with the news that they are merging their product lines
and releasing a complete Linux/KDE office suite this coming
November. Dubbed
"HancomOffice
2.0", the suite will combine 4 Hancom products
(Word, a word processor, Sheet, a spreadsheet, Presenter, a
presentation program, and Painter, a bitmap drawing program) with
4 theKompany.com products (EasyDB, a personal database management
system familiar to us asreKall,
Envision, a diagram and flowchart drawing tool familiar to us as
the KOffice componentKivio,
WebBuilder, an HTML/PHP editing tool familiar to us asQuanta+, and QuickSilver,
a personal information manager familiar to us asAethera).
The Word/Sheet/Presenter applications are advertised as outstanding
at both importing and exporting the corresponding MS Office formats. Because it uses Qt 3.0 the same
boxed set will run on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and -- yes --
even embedded devices (some planned devices were announced).
Although the products are pure Qt, with 3.0's new features they should
integrate nicely into the KDE desktop.
Suggested retail price: $99. Ready or
not, KDE is coming to Main Street!

I don't know whether this is good news or bad news. Here we have, another office suite coming in town.. that means another set of file formats to take care of. Is TheKompany planning to keep all file formats open? Or are they heading in the same dirty direction of M$ where the file formats are not documented atall!

Its based on Qt3 and we know that KDE 3 isn't coming out anytime soon. That means Qt3 won't be installed by default.. When Qt3 is installed on top of Qt2, what happens?

Now what lies in future for KOffice? What happens to Kivio, ReKall, Aethera? Does the GPL development stop suddenly?

Anyway, definitely a good news that another application suite is coming to Linux and esp. KDE! Star office is too bloated since it uses its own UI library and nobody else used the KDE/Qt framework till now.. So this could head towards success!!

Finally, I just hope they select some better names.. Hancom, QuickSilver etc. are not at all trendy..

I'm sure they will be staticly linked binary's. I'm very excited about this. Finally a real MS Office competitor thats not running wine. The best thing of all is that its Qt so it will fit nicely into my desktop.
--
Craig

Does the Kompany owns Quanta code ?
what is the Xp screenshot, a port of qt ?
I don't want to blame this product, I think this is really a good news but I would like to be sure that it is not vaporware or something.
Thanks

Quanta used to be Free but some of the developers decided to go commercial with it and relicensed it. I guess theKompany was the company that got it.

>what is the Xp screenshot, a port of qt ?

QT has always been available for Windows, and won't require any porting to work under XP. Any 100% QT-native program (such as these office programs) will work on any of QT's platforms with a simple recompile (theoretically).

> Any 100% QT-native program (such as these office programs) will work on any of QT's
> platforms with a simple recompile (theoretically).

And practically!

As a Qt-windows licence holder, I confirm this. It took 1 day to make a 30000 lines unix Qt program compile under windows, and one week to make it link :-), because we were not experienced with windows lib/dll stuff. Now, it would link the same day it compiles.

I'm trying to figure out what I can use as a build environment that will work on both windows and unix with QT apps, and I'm getting the impression that (barring building with cygwin/gcc) autoconf doesn't do this very well? I'd love to be wrong :-)

Yes they are...did you not read above...
thekompany is adding kivio, rekall, and quanta+
to hancom office.

no Painter is not Kivio...
Envision is Kivio...which is actaully a pretty cool name for it.

and yes...that does *APPREAR* to be kivio(envision) running under XP.

Personally I think releasing cross platform applications is a good idea. It gets people to use applications on familiar terms, then they realize, hey these apps are native linux apps! and makes us even more appealing.

the world is never going to be a one operating system world...the best way to go about it is to make yourself compatible with a lot of them. Kind of like Opera.

This has been thekompany's plan for a while now...to release their apps on both linux and windows. Data Architect is already released on both from the beginning.

I'm confused. So far theKompany and KDE have managed to stay out of each others' way for the most part, but this move puts theKompany and the KDE project in direct competition! What will happen to KOffice? Will developers lose interest and switch to using HancomOffice? Will KOffice continue to improve and eventually replace HancomOffice, hurting theKompany and Hancom? Do theKompany and Hancom hope to perpetually improve their HancomOffice product so that it is always ahead of the features of KOffice?

Some informed comment would be great here. David Faure, Shawn Gordon? Comments?

I think your missing it. Koffice is strictly KDE while HancomOffice is a multiplatform solution allowing corporations to easily plug KDE and Linux into there networks. If anything it will help KDE and bring it into the mainstream. I don't think it will be a Koffice competitor. This is truly a good thing.

And why not? They each provide: a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, and a bitmap picture editor. If HancomOffice is better than KOffice, KOffice use will be very low. If KOffice gets to be better than HancomOffice, everyone will start using KOffice because its free. That's competition.

Also, distros such as Mandrake (employer of David Faure, main KOffice coordinator and programmer) may decide to license HancomOffice and stop sponsoring KOffice development. Programmers who would otherwise have worked on KOffice might decide to simply pay $99 and use HancomOffice. KOffice could be hurt by this.

Now, I'm not saying that HancomOffice is bad, I'm just confused by theKompany's move here. So far they have taken steps to keep their programs away from KDE programs, but now they're competing with a KDE project.

Who cares? I live by the rule that the best idea wins. If Hancom delivers the best product at a price the market accepts, then they win. The alternative is for the KOffice folks to ramp-up and meet the challenge.

Hi, this is a "service person" from HancomLinux.
First, I would like to say that HancomLinux was too exaggerated about the system requirements.
I found out that 200MHz was way enough to run it.
Now, we have fixed that point on our web site, so you can check it out on

Hm, evaluation version of HancomOffice (without TheKompany's products) has 95 Mb!
Who says StarOffice is bloated ;-)
I'll stick with KOffice, just hoping that KOffice developers will stick with it too :)

I just installed the 60 days demo of Hancom, and tried to play with it. The word processor is still a wine port and even points you to a c:=\d rive to save your work.

Hancom office feels strange, alien even, compared to StarOffice or KOffice. I feel ther eviewer from LinuxPlanet was quite right when hed ismissed the suite for now.( http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/3274/4/), but quite probably a new version, based on Qt 3.0 would be worth the money.

The koffice filters are coming along nice. The msoffice filter in kword works really nice over here, an rtf import filter by edwald snel featuring tables/styles will be comitted to cvs soon, and a wordperfect input filter was comitted yesterday or so.

I'm afraid that it will not be integrated with KDE. The KParts are KDE-only solution, so probably those programs will live its own life - something like a next ( lightweight probably ) StarOffice. I've heard something about COM capabilities of Qt - but I was able to find only something about generating uuid's and a single pure virtual class. If we have got a simple interface like QOleDocument ( which, implemented, should result in a cross-platform embeddable component ) we would be able to write a real cross-platform applications - but now they have to follow a StarOffice path. I think that a very few people will use it on Linux. What a pity !

This seems a little odd to me. I'm not very familiar with Hancom's products, but they look pretty mature. ReKall and Aethera are not yet ready for prime time. Last time I tried Aethera (maybe a month ago) I'm not sure it did much of anything (I remember it crashing, if that counts). I had high hopes for Rekall because I had done some work with KDB and found it to be pretty feature-complete, but when I installed it, I discovered that it had a ways to go, especially WRT the UI. I know it's early in the game, but it seems a little premature to be slapping these partially finished products in with the mature ones (Quanta is very nice) and call it an office suite.

What happens if, say, I'm using a GPL app called kdegplapp version 2.1 and the original author and copyright holder decides to relicense to a proprietary license? Can I branch the code at 2.1 and continue to develop the codebase? Can the author retroactively decide that I can't use the application? I'm confused as to what the implications are...

No, you can fork the project at any point you like. License changes cannot be retroactively applied: if I release version 0.0.1 under the GPL, that version is permanently under that license (of course, I can release 0.0.1a which is exactly the same, only under a different license -- but that has no effect on the licensing or distribution terms of version 0.0.1). This has happened before -- for example, OpenSSH is based off a (very) old version of SSH, before the license changed to become commercial. A copy of the old version was still available so the OpenBSD people used that -- and SSH Inc. couldn't stop them.

I see no harm that can come from this...
I'm an Open Racer developer ( a very small one on a very great and much more talented team ), and our goal is to keep the Tux Racer (turning Comercial) code base alive... We do not damn Tux Racer, we wish it success!

If we have life our way, we will replace Tux Racer on all Distros (especialy the GPL'd release), while Tux Racer will grow and offer a serious, and cool, comercial offering for those who are willing to pay for it...
I think Open Source and Comercial can live together... Until any comercial product overly dominates and gets Greedy... Then, and only then, is it important that all comercial and Open operations come together and bring an open standard...

If you are fighting Microsoft, you would see that Open Source and Comercial offerings are a good thing... (However, this might be a distorted view)

If you are fighting all comercial operations, and really believe this product will enslave the world... You are even wronger, because Open Source alternatives will not slow...

Comercial products like this may be better for, say, the city of Largo, or others large groups looking to use linux... than the individual; however, it can only be a good thing... And hopefully any comercial effort that fails will release Open Source...

Why was this article not marked with '[Ed: commercial software]' or something, like similiar previous articles? And what's the direct relation to KDE for a pure Qt based office suite that ships software that is no more maintained inside KDE (kivio...) ? I for one don't think this article belongs to the dot. It's a commercial advertisement of a non-KDE software.

Because it benefits KDE, and uses the Qt libraries, which are inextricably linked with KDE on the news-wires. Frankly, I think this is a _good_ thing. It'll help two outstanding Linux companies stay above water. It also provides a nice easy migration path to Linux. It's been said before, once you get people used to the applications, what platform they run on is immaterial.

To be honest, I wish theKompany all the best in this effort. The suite of apps they've lined up looks outstanding for $99 - the Painter app looks like it has all the features of many art apps that are sold for $99 on their own (e.g. Paint Shop Pro). I'd say they should chase the OEM market, particularly the smaller ones, with a vengence. They could really do well out of this.

One month ago, I said that I didn't feel that the strategy of the Kompany was clear. Now, it is...

There is a good size and a bad size. I prefer look at the good size : a new challenge for the KOffice team is to build the best KDE Office. Even, it has to be the first challenge now...

And it would not be easy. The Hancom Office page is pretty and some things are very in advance, comparing to KOffice.

There is a big work to do for enhancing the existing good young apps, for reactiving some sleeping apps (Krayon, Kivio, Quanta Plus...) and for creating some new apps (Katabase...). What an exciting challenge ! I hope that new developpers will be interested and involved !

And I hope that it will be a fair challenge, that easy and efficient filters will be built between the two offices...